Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday December 29, 2012 @08:27AM
from the more-is-still-welcome dept.

mbadolato writes "On December 9, 2012, Slashdot reported that the FreeBSD Foundation was falling short of their 2012 goal of $500,000 by nearly 50%. For all of those that continued to echo about how FreeBSD is dying, it's less than three weeks later and the total is presently nearing $200,000 OVER the goal. Netcraft continues to be wrong."
And reader hypnosec adds another crowdfunding success story: "The Wikimedia Foundation has announced at the conclusion of its ninth annual fund-raiser that it has managed to raise a whopping $25 million from 1.2 million donors in just over a week's time. ... As compared to last year's fund-raiser, which got completed in 46 days, this year's was completed in just nine days."

That's my use case as well. I gave them some cash, lord knows I've used their efforts enough.

My surprise when setting up the ZFS server was in how well everything has worked so far. ZFS has also caught corruption a few times, so I'm going to give it props. It has me wondering if it is possible to get the same kind of data integrity on Mac or Windows. As a stopgap, I sync everything important with Unison so that I can see bitrot on the Mac/PC side. I once caught a really nasty corruption in the middle of my Photos directory that rendered several jpegs useless. More recently I caught another, though this time it was just in the preview image so it wouldn't have been a big deal. It makes me wonder what is going on in the directories that I don't sync!

For Windows, if you are willing to use NTFS on an iSCSI volume hosted on ZFS by a FreeBSD NAS, you could still benefit from the checksumming provided by ZFS. See the comments by 3dinfluence here: http://serverfault.com/a/122408/79266 [serverfault.com]

Or you could run a ZFS NAS in a FreeBSD VM on Windows, of course, and use it via SMB from Windows.

For Windows, there is the promise of ReFS, but for now I just don't keep anything irreplaceable on there.

I'll have to give Zevo a spin. I played with the old MacZFS several years ago and decided it wasn't quite ready for prime-time, but I might give it another go. For now, I just end up backing up certain important things to ZFS, and because I use Unison, I have a very high chance of catching corruption as long as the backups are frequent enough. Unison does a two-way sync, but I use that aspect to detect c

You are correct. Where Unison helps is that I can see when two files differ between the ZFS backup and the original on Windows/Mac. If I see a file with a diff, but the modified dates and sizes are identical, I know something is up. This has occurred a few times now.

This works even without ZFS, but I've never had the ZFS version go corrupt.

I use mine for a few things:- Media server. This uses surprisingly little space, though that may change when I switch to high-def.- Backup. This is where all the space disappears to. The 3 computers in the house all target it.- CrashPlan. Every time a friend or relative has me touch their computer, they get CrashPlan pointed to my server.- Services. My photos, music, and some other data get shared via various services.

Seconded. I bought another 8 drives at black friday prices and doubled my RAIDZ2 to 18TB. There just is no alternative to the functionality provided by ZFS. If you need big storage on an open source platform, you either pay a ton for fancy controllers or use ZFS. I've used FreeBSD for over 12 years now and there was only a brief time when I considered an alternative (Dragonfly), but ZFS has me locked in now. I wish the linux guys had gone for it instead of relying on btrfs.

ZFS does work under Linux - my understanding is that the only reason you don't find it in the main repositories (Ubuntu has it in a PPA) is a licensing issue. Or is there some technical issue I'm missing?

The licensing issue is that both CDDL (the license for ZFS) and GPL (the license for the Linux kernel) are copyleft licenses -- and they're not the same copyleft license -- so they are legally incompatible with each other. It's a common problem when copyleft licenses meet. Unless you're playing tricks with shims and wrappers, such as by running ZFS in userspace somehow, or forcing end users to do all the work of setting up ZFS rather than making it quick and easy to set up, you're probably violating the C

Unless you're playing tricks with shims and wrappers, such as by running ZFS in userspace somehow, or forcing end users to do all the work of setting up ZFS rather than making it quick and easy to set up, you're probably violating the CDDL and GPL by distributing ZFS with a Linux distribution.

The official position [zfsonlinux.org] is that the license conflict just means you can't compile it into the kernel, not that you can't publish it as a kernel module.

I acknowledge that there is some controversy over whether kernel modules are considered derivative works, but the fact that proprietary drivers do exist and are often available in the non-free sections of repositories contradicts the idea that the licensing issue alone is enough to stop it. Furthermore, Linus' opinion on the matter seems to be that modules dev

If the driver needs to be integrated into a monolithic whole with the code that makes it compatible with something distributed under the GPL (such as the Linux kernel), there's some danger of being liable for license violation if someone wants to make a stink about it -- and it's not just the GPL that may be the problem, remember: Oracle is the owner of the ZFS copyrights, and the ZFS is distributed under the terms of a copyleft license.

How you go about getting the pieces of software to play well with each

A number of ZFS developers work on both platforms, so features flow pretty freely between the two. There's also a Linux ZFS implementation maintained in Gentoo, and they're also pretty good at pushing changes in the FreeBSD direction.

ZoL is why I moved to OpenIndiana. The performance was terrible, even without dedupe or compression turned on I was getting maybe 10MB/sec writes. Same pool under OI runs at an appropriate 120MB/sec, no changes other than OS. Mind you, this was over a year ago, so maybe they've fixed the performance issues.

All this proves is that some people are willing to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to things that are important. If only we/they would do the same with some political contributions to those who are trying to change things for the better (human rights, privacy rights, less spying, copyright/patent reform, tort reform, etc, etc, etc).

You must be an absolute blast to hang out with, if on hearing good news, you feel compelled to whine about lack of involvement in unrelated areas.

Happy Man: I got tickets to go see Whiner: All that proves is that some people are willing to pay to hear live music. If only we/they would do the same for theatre!

Happy Man: I had to study three evenings a week for years, and now I finally got my degree!Whiner: All that proves is that people will put in time for things important to them. If only we/they would do the same in cleaning up litter in the neighbourhood.

Happy Man: I had to speak up on this one. It's shameful that women are being denied access to birth control.Whiner: All that proves is that people will speak up on things that matter to them. If only we/they would do the same for Internet whiners who find themselves derided in posts such as this one.

This is very good news for FreeBSD and BSD in general. Go somewhere and do something to help your pet causes.

"This is very good news for FreeBSD and BSD in general. Go somewhere and do something to help your pet causes."
the poster is pointing out that if this is considered newsworthy in the sense that it is surprising and it should make people happy, we are in a sad state. we should really be complaining that freebsd had to suffer on the path to meeting it's goals, and it took an uprising of good hearted doners to compensate for neglect. this is why the OP is upset, and that comes across.
so to talk to you in y

Crowdfunding really is gathering some serious momentum though, I'm seeing a lot more projects rapidly exceeding their goals now than a few years back. The word is spreading. Maybe the end of the VC era?

No, not the end of the VC era. Crowdfunding as it stands now via the popular implementations such as kickstarter is not investing, its just donations and its not even new. Its only new because some silly projects get massive amounts of money when any VC person would know better than to invest. Ouya as an example. Ridiculous amounts of donations for a project that offers no reason what so ever that it will be anymore than just another Android device, and not even a particularly impressive one at that.

It is doing something different, you pointed out the differences yourself.

VCs earned the nickname "vulture capitalists" because they have a tendency to pump up companies as quickly as possible and then reap the benefits - the dot com bubble was largely a VC creation. Anytime I see a company with a staff of fifty doing a job that could be done by five, sure enough there's a VC trying to float/seeking rounds of investment from bigger fish behind it. The latest buzzword is "nano", the sexier it sounds the more

This isn't 'good news', its more of a 'look you stupid BSD is Dying morons, once again you dont' fucking get it' as to refute the last retarded article claiming that BSD had fallen utterly short of its goal.

This is more of a finger to Linux fanboys on slashdot than anything else.

"This is very good news for FreeBSD and BSD in general. Go somewhere and do something to help your pet causes." the poster is pointing out that if this is considered newsworthy in the sense that it is surprising and it should make people happy, we are in a sad state. we should really be complaining that freebsd had to suffer on the path to meeting it's goals, and it took an uprising of good hearted doners to compensate for neglect. this is why the OP is upset, and that comes across. so to talk to you in your own language: you're not being helpful. this is very bad news for consumers and humanity in general. go somewhere and do something intelligent. if youwan't to live in your happy world with happy people go look at some lolcats.

In their own words, it's normal that 50% of their fundraising comes during their end of year campaigns. Where does the suffering come in to this? Fortunately they're looking to change this.

It is good news in the sense that a group run on donations can't assume those donations will magically come, and in this instance they exceeded their target by a pretty decent margin. I've no idea where you arrived at that interpretation of the ACs post. By my reading it's about people generally being unwilling to put mon

I did check that page and investigated a bit and found out that the page hasn't really been updated in a while since NetBSD 6.0 has been out for a few months already, and if we check the money gauge image, we get:

Last-Modified: Wed, 30 Dec 2009 21:30:05 GMT

They probably have gone above the ~$13k the image shows. It just hasn't been updated in three years, for whatever reason.

Maybe the Linux Foundation (or someone else, they're the first that come to mind) could do a similar thing to raise money for improving the Linux graphics and wireless stacks? How much improvement could we get for a million USD? Or perhaps there are individual developers out there who would do what Poul-Henning Kamp [freebsd.org] did? I'd be happy to contribute to such an initiative. Kickstart it?

I donate (small amounts) to FreeBSD almost every year, and I don't even use their software currently. They have an important place in the history of Unix-like operating systems, and I have used their software for some great projects in the past.

Wikipedia is so obnoxious with their fundraising, I've stopped donating. The local news recently reported that the most visited page on Wikipedia was "Facebook", and I rarely use it. I did get a kick out of their previous campaign where the staffers photos were ab

if an entity has the following charactoristics:
1- good product (quality)
2- product is appreciated (demand)
3- costs are reasonable (feasibility)
4- has a consumer base with spending power (viability)

then it will NECESSARILY meet it's goals. this is basic economics of supply and demand. didn't we all learn this in highschool?

let me fix this article:

"corporations with crap products who raise money with psychological tactics are increasingly finding it difficult to get funding because of the internet."

i would also add: "projects such as netbsd and openbsd that add enormous value to the lives of every human being are underappreciated because the consumer is ignorant of them, and so they fall short of funding goals some times, and it befalls us as responsible technologists to make sure that they continue to protect our interests with the same selfless, joyful, gracious generosity that we have been able to enjoy for so long without giving much in return"

typing this message just left a bad taste in my mouth. to realize that somehow everyone doesn't get this stuff is sad.

It's a bit more complex than that. The goal is an annual goal and is set at the start of the year. In the past, most of the donations have come towards the end of the year, as they did this year, but they've been quietly raising money all year. It's not like the first $400K came in those first four days: most of it came months earlier. One of the priorities for the Foundation in 2013 is encouraging companies to donate earlier (individuals tend to donate at random times anyway, companies when they realis

Intel GPU support is in 9.1 and -CURRENT (10.0). nVidia support is available from their blob. The Nouveau stuff is apparently not much effort to port, but no one has done it. The big omission is AMD, because it depends on TTM, which is not yet implemented in FreeBSD.

In fact, I wish that PC-BSD, if not FBSD, adds support for Wayland, and allows DEs that implement their Window managers in Wayland to run on top of it. While FBSD may want X11 for legacy reasons, I doubt that the same is as true about PC-BSD.

I think you mean you wish that Wayland would grow some support for FreeBSD. It was designed in the first place with the Linux kernel assumed in its target platform, which means some changes need to be made in Wayland for smooth porting to FreeBSD. That, at least, is my understanding (I haven't actually looked at the sources for Wayland).

Thank you, FBSD, for being a pioneer not only in implementing IPv6, but also producing possibly the first IPv6-only implementation of an OS. I hope that Monowall and pFsense develop advanced IPv6 specific security and routing features that makes them fully usable for that purpose.

One of the things I like about FreeBSD is their openess to languages (in contrast to OpenBSD, who think C is the only language around...)Throughout the years, FreeBSD developers reached out for what they thought were the best languages for the job: Modula-3 (for cvsup, though now deprecated), Forth on the boot loader (ideal, right? Can drop you into a little Forth shell), Ruby for ports infrastructure. In that way, they are not prejudiced about programming languages. Users contribute a great deal too. All the things you get in Debian (lots of languages).

FreeBSD developers also have ported important innovations that are open-sourced but lacking in Linux, because of pure ideology (the GPL doesn't play well with others): Apple's Grand Central Dispatch (a framework that implements concurrency *correctly*), and LLVM (which as a side effect, brings C blocks [wikipedia.org] (effectively, closures for C).

Additionally, many vendors support FreeBSD. I, for instance, run Eiffel on FreeBSD (for the world's best introduction to Object Oriented Programming: A Touch of class [touch.ethz.ch]. Common Lisp has vendors that support FreeBSD (LispWorks, Franz), and so has Smalltalk (Cincom, Smalltalk/X). All these vendors have free products and commercial support.

There's nothing stopping anyone from doing whatever they want with C++ on FreeBSD. But seriously, C++? Shouldn't you be looking at D?

Yes, portupgrade is separate from the base system, available through the ports system itself. It's only "deprecated", however, in that it used to essentially be "the standard" for ports system front ends, and has been edged out in that regard by portmaster. There are other front ends as well, though, and they're there to provide choices, as is portmaster.

On Mac OS X, Unix is a whole lot of Objective-C.It has the semantics of the purest of OO languages (Smalltalk), but you can mix and match with C. That allows for speed and fast development without the pain and the bugs. It's probably the number one factor for the success of Mac OS as the number 1 Unix out there for users (power users included). No, actually, number 1 OS, period.If you ask me, Steve Jobs was wright.

LLVM/Clang, the biggest bit, which is the C/C++ (and Objective-C) compiler.

libstdc++, libsupc++, libc++ and libcxxrt, which are the old and new STL and C++ runtime libraries, respectively.

devd, which is the utility responsible for performing actions in response to device events (USB device inserted, battery low, and so on).

In a few days, there will also be a BSDL replacement for the GPL'd device tree compiler landing. This is a simple tool that converts between source and flattened device trees, and since it is doing a lot of stuff that involves building maps I decided to use C++ and std::map rather than reinvent the wheel or do something ugly involving macros. Performance isn't an issue, since it's intended to parse input files that are typically under 12KB and produce output that is even smaller, so even without optimisation it uses around 10KB of RAM and under a tenth of a second of CPU time. A higher-level language might have been appropriate, but it's also potentially important to be able to include a statically linked copy for recovery, which rules out most high-level languages.

Note that none of the kernel, and no userland utilities essential for operation are written in C++.

It's glad to see that at least some OS people in the FOSS community pick tools based on how well they are at the particular task at hand, as opposed to their ideological biases ("C good, C++ bad" etc).

Then again, FreeBSD development was always much more pragmatic than Linux, from what I've seen.

It's currently $184,905K over, and was before TFA was posted. If you're going to be pedantic about rounding, then you probably shouldn't round in your own comment. There are also a few large pledges (e.g. from Netflix), which may or may not arrive in time to be counted towards the 2012 total. If they don't, then the 2013 total will get an early boost. If they do, then they'll easily push it over the $200K-over mark.